The airport-sized project by China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. is the jewel in the crown of roughly €20 billion of investments that Prime Minister Viktor Orban says will allow the economy to thrive from Europe’s green transition. Nowhere in the world is ramping up battery production faster on a per capita basis than Hungary.
Town hall meetings on new battery-related investments have descended into shouting matches. Even in strongholds of Orban’s ruling Fidesz party, people have called local officials “traitors.” The government has since changed laws to no longer require in-person consultations.“Nobody asked us if we wanted this plant,” said Zoltan Timar, the Fidesz mayor of Mikepercs, the suburb of Debrecen nearest the CATL plant.
In just a few years, the country of less than 10 million people is projected to become the fourth-largest producer of batteries globally, after China, the US and Germany, according to BloombergNEF data. Teacher Julianna Lam Palla in Göd complained about the smell of “rotten fish” coming from the taps in her house. Though she had no proof the cause was the battery plant, years of being ignored by local officials convinced her to move. “There are so many questions, so much anger and disillusionment,” Lam Palla said as she played with her dog by the Danube.
A study published this year in the journal Scientific Reports found lithium in the tap water in cities across Hungary’s 19 counties, though not in quantities hazardous to humans. Whether the environmental concerns were warranted or not, the argument reverberated across Hungary. To opponents, it underscored the potential risks to communities when a battery plant moves in, and also the cost of resisting it.
“Battery plants have rapidly come to define Hungary’s economy but they’re also a political choice,” said Andrea Elteto, a researcher at the World Economy Institute in Budapest. “They dovetail with Orban’s goal of connecting East and West in the hope that benefiting firms will work to sustain him in power.”
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